In
JSF, what you are attempting to do (I believe) is a Phase Listener. Although it's possible to perform the work in a backing bean by implementing the listener interface, it's more commonly done in a separate class that implements the interface. Phase Listeners can be invoked before or after any phase...in your case, you would want to invoke it after the RESTORE_VIEW phase.
That being said, I suspect that your application is attempting to do something that may be easier
without the phase listener. You were referring to "updating the components state, behavior or fashion (in my backingbeans) on the startup of my pages". A lot of that can be done by just using the lifecycle in the way in which it was designed. For an excellent description of the work that occurs automatically in the different lifecycle phases, see JavaServer Faces: The Complete Reference. Although the index is rather poor, the first chapters are a very good tutorial on this topic.
As an example (and off the top of my head...there might be a different/better way to do this): you can include markup using the <f:verbatim> tag, which can be rendered or not depending on the state of backing bean properties. This would give you the ability to specify different CSS for different runtime conditions. And often, there is no need to directly interact with the component tree and the values contained therein...again, depending on your application.